Every time I open gitkrarken it gets stuck at opening repo icon. I can't open/clone/init repo.
I heard some others have the same problem but no one seems to know why this is happening and what the solution is.
Can anyone help with this?

Not seeing this .gitkraken folder in the home folder. I am on a Windows machine though and this folder is located in %APPDATA% (namely C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming). Deleted the folder, but sadly, didn't fix my problem.
– AhmedBMJul 19 '17 at 18:47

I just had a similar (maybe the same) problem with GitKraken V2.7.0 x64 on Windows.
GitKraken crashed and tried to open the repo after that. This never finished. I assume this is caused by visual studio which was open at the time and VS and GitKraken are not exactly friends. I killed GitKraken, closed VS. After that, when opening the repo in GitKraken, it said something like "there is no repo, do you want to initialize it?". This also failed.
Not sure what the root cause for the problem is.

The solution however was to checkout another branch from the CLI. After that GitKraken magically worked again. Maybe this helps someone.

OMG thanks! Git Krakken used to be good now its doing this kind of stuff may need to switch. Might have been this coupled with the above solutions that got it working for me, but deleting index file certainly did the trick.
– NonlinApr 16 '18 at 20:56

For us, it was the fact that the one of our guys had the repo cloned to a OneDrive folder.

When the repo was in a OneDrive folder GitKraken would open and then constantly refresh so you couldn't click or do anything. You could describe it as GitKracken looked like it was 'flashing' on screen.

As soon as we moved the repo to a folder not monitored by OneDrive it worked just fine.

A little more detail might be helpful to others. What, exactly, about being in a OneDrive folder caused troubles?
– Karl WilburApr 15 '18 at 0:07

Onedrive folders have the ability to have online and offline files. Going in Parameters-> Parameters tab -> "On demand files" and unchecking the box made it work. This option seems to have come with a recent onedrive update.
– V. BrunelleMay 2 '18 at 15:46

In my case, the issue was with a .jfm (binary) file that my SSDT (Sql Server Data Tools) project generates. When that file changes, GK starts having this issue. If I manually commit (or revert) that file, the problem goes away.

By now, I'm sure this answer won't help who asked the question, but maybe this will help people in the future. I just simply deleted and re-cloned the repo that GitKraken was trying to open. Worked like a charm for me.

Did the same, only option that worked! However it seemed like I also had problems with some git loose objects, and I think this is what made GitKraken crash, because there's no reason that deleting the .gitkraken folder wouldn't be enough to solve the pb.
– avazulaMar 28 '18 at 9:26

I manually removed all files had [conflict] in their names from .git folder and its subfolders. Then, I performed a git gc to compress the database and finally git fsck to make sure everything is just fine. Now, I can open the repo in GitKraken.

For me hanging GitKraken, if i delete branches in local or origin place. After this start hanging in main window or changes lister in right. Little help is if you run "GIT GC" (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc)

To me the problem was that the git database was not compacted. git gui showed that notification (enter link description here). By compacting it (through git gui or git gc, I assume) it fixed the problem with GitKraken.

I just had the same problem. I found that my .git/logs/HEAD had a bad entry (don't know how that happened nor why gitg and the git CLI both ignored the issue). Totally a problem with my repo, not GitKraken.

More detail...

To figure this out, I cloned the repo into a separate directory and meld'd them to see what was different. I opened GitKraken to this new clone; all's well. I then started copying things over from the old repo directory to the new one (objects, refs, logs, etc.). Once I copied that log file over, GitKraken went back to the "Opening repo" message.

Digging deeper into that log file I found a bad line. I was able to determine from the context how to re-create that bad line. Once I fixed it, GitKraken was happy.

In my case, such GitKraken glitch is reproducing stably, when I make an attempt to attach some Dokku (https://github.com/dokku/dokku) remote repository with git remote add. Removing it fixes the issue. I think Heroku repos may cause the same issue, though never checked it.

UPD: It is not Dokku/Heroku which causing troubles in my case. Any time when I use SSH-like URL for any remote repository (like git@github.com:reponame...), I get cyclic reloading of GitKraken. By coincidence, Dokku and Heroku use SSH-like URLs by default. Once SSH-like URLs are removed or changed to HTTPS, GitKraken is ok.

I had the same problem. Reading all of the above it appeared that my workflow was incorrect. I opened Excel and Notepad++ and suchlike to make changes to the repo and then opened GitKarken and was faced with the spinning circle. Of course all of these other programs took locks on the files. As soon as I closed all of the other programs and the restarted GitKraken it worked!!
So more correct workflow would be to open GitKraken first and let it connect everything together, then do some work. Commit was no problem after that.

In my case, I found out the problem was caused by the index file in ".git" folder.

The index is a binary file (generally kept in .git/index) containing a
sorted list of path names, each with permissions and the SHA1 of a
blob object; git ls-files can show you the contents of the index.

I had this problem using one repo, but not on others. The problem child was fairly large and complicated. I tried many of the solutions here to no avail. Then, I tried a pretty obvious patch - and upgraded the software. I went from GitKraken v3.x to v4.x and that did it!